Tuesday, 29 July 2014

While filming the last William Boquet,
two major things happened: I moved in with the woman whom I would
eventually marry, and I decided to write a new ambitious script about
two iconic characters. Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein? Nope,
I wasn't there yet. The initial project was Zorro vs Sherlock
Holmes.

I've always been fond of time-defying characters: Robin
Hood, Dracula, the Three Musketeers... And Zorro of course. Before I
even thought of being a writer-director, I wanted to be an actor. To
play Zorro. And before that, I wanted to be Zorro himself. So the
concept of having him and Holmes meet and fight seemed exciting. Both
swordsmen, one of them cultivating mysteries, the other solving them.
Of course the timeframe wouldn't allow Sherlock Holmes to meet Don
Diego de la Vega in his prime, but he could easily meet his grandson – which was
the setup for this script.

Holmes and Watson, in their early years
(not long after A Study a Scarlet), travel to California in
order to unmask a dangerous criminal who calls himself Zorro. Of
course, they eventually find out that he's fighting the good fight,
against a corrupt local government. Together, they retrieve a treasure
that had been unfairly confiscated from the Indian people, and they
bring down the evil military in an epic final swordfight. Or
something like that. I was really excited about this project. I had
re-read the whole Sherlock Holmes Canon, as well as Johnston
McCulley's original Zorro novel. I had spent hours watching films about
both characters, in order to sort out what made them interesting.

But despite having a beginning and an
end, the story was hard to put together. Why would the evil military
call Sherlock Holmes to help them? Why would Zorro need him to
overpower the bad guys? How could the viewer be excited by Holmes
unmasking Zorro, when his identity would already be known to him? And
if we hide it from him, by having several “potential Zorros”,
then how will the viewer care for this character? And most of all:
how is there going to be a foe charismatic enough to stand in front
of two legends?

John Neville as Holmes

A lot of those questions derived from
the fact that Holmes and Zorro are both positive characters, who
can't really be opposed unless one of them loses the audience's
sympathy. It's like having a movie called Batman vs Superman
(oh wait!), you know that they will eventually join forces. So unless
you have a great villain, someone that the viewer already knows, it
kind of falls flat because your heroes won't be fighting a big
threat. I didn't want to bring Moriarty into the plot, it was against
my rules – which rules, you might ask? Watching and reading
non-canonical Holmes stories, I have observed that most of them (if
not all!) featured one or more of the following characters: Irene
Adler, Mycroft Holmes and/or Professor Moriarty. I ended up finding
it very annoying, since these characters are only featured once or
twice over the course of 60 stories written by Conan Doyle. Hell,
Moriarty is often believed to be Sherlock's recurring nemesis, when
he's only the main antagonist in one short story (and one that seems
to have been hastily written by Conan Doyle in order to kill off his
detective). Watson doesn't even get to meet him in person! As for
Irene Adler, a lot of versions want us to believe that Holmes and her
have been romantically involved, to the point where they're sometimes
supposed to have a child together. But in A Scandal in Bohemia,
Watson clearly states: “It was not that he felt any emotion akin to
love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were
abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind.” In
fact, several stories have Holmes fall in love, with Adler or someone
else, when that goes against all 60 canonical adventures! Bottom line
is: I decided that if I was to write a Sherlock Holmes story, I
wouldn't use Irene Adler, Mycroft or Moriarty.

While I was struggling with the plot,
looking for a way to make it worthwhile (without letting Holmes or
Zorro become the other's supporting character), I stumbled upon the
information that Zorro wasn't public domain property. It belonged to
the Zorro Estate, who probably wouldn't allow the character to be
used in a crossover with another hero. In the 60s, Zorro had been
confronted to Maciste, the Three Musketeers, and even naked women in a
few soft-porn movies, but the copyright-holders had straightened the
line in the 90s with “mainstream” productions such as the Antonio
Banderas movies, the book by Isabel Allende or the recent musical
show. So here I was, stuck with a story that didn't quite work and a
character that possibly could be an obstacle to making the film even
if I sorted out the plot. So I started toying around with the idea of
replacing him with another mysterious avenger, probably the Scarlet
Pimpernel – which would have moved the plot to France.

But one day, lightning struck. It was
the end of February, 2010. I was sitting in a movie theater, in front
of a French comedy that didn't have my full attention. Suddenly, I
thought of Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein. It didn't have
anything to do with what I was watching. It was just a title that
popped up. During the last 30 minutes of the screening, the main
elements of the script came together in my head. When the credits hit
the screen, I left the theater (which I usually don't do, I like to
stay until the very end – even for movies I don't like!) and rushed
home, where my 6-month pregnant wife saw me go straight to my desk,
take a pen and paper, and write down the outline for this new script.
It all felt so obvious, that I couldn't understand why it hadn't
occurred to me earlier: Sherlock Holmes and Watson would travel to
Germany, not California or France. And they would have to unmask a
mad scientist, one who would have created a giant monster. It made
perfect sense: Holmes was the hero, the monster was a menace and the
identity of the mad scientist was the mystery to solve. Now I knew
the direction I was headed. I just didn't realize how long the
journey would be.

Tuesday, 22 July 2014

a BA in
management and finance. And William Boquet came back. Instead of
looking for a regular job, I went on to work on a new episode for my
detective, entitled William Boquet dans la quatrième dimension(William Boquet in the
Fourth Dimension). This
one would be a silent movie, shot in black & white (or rather in
an intense sepia monochrome), and would focus on everyone BUT William
Boquet. He would only show up in the last scene and kick the shit out
of the bad guys. This last idea came from the fact that I initially
thought I would play the character myself... which I ultimately
didn't. The part went to a friend called Pierre, who would later
return for two installments of the franchise. In a small but very
funny part, Matthieu Huvelin was being beaten up by two thugs; he would
eventually become a composer on a lot of my movies, including the
upcoming Sherlock Holmes vs
Frankenstein!

The first three films were shot on Hi-8
and VHS-C, this one was the first for which we used DV. It was also
the first episode to be edited on a computer, and not with a VCR
connected to the camcorder or to a Hi-Fi (no kidding, this is how the
others were edited and mixed). Apparently, it was entertaining enough
to be selected in a short film festival in Grenoble. Only two amateur
movies had made it into the selection, and we were running against 18

sketches for Avant-Garde

films made with professional means. William Boquet 4 was very
fun to to make, and a lot of people seemed to like it. To this day,
it's still the best of the bunch, because things went a bit downhill
afterwards. This is one time in my life where I probably should have
stopped amateur filmmaking and started doing things properly. But I
went the lazy and cowardly route for a few years, paying my bills
with jobs I didn't care for, and sticking to making films with no crew, no budget and zero technical equipment.

That same summer, I made a short film
called Avant-Garde, about.... Frankenstein. So you might say
2003 was the first time I pitted “Sherlock Holmes” (a version of
him, at least) against Frankenstein, in a way. Avant-Garde
told the story of Victor Frankenstein creating his monster, then
dreaming that it survived through the 1930s, 60s, 90s and beyond. The
film was 12 minutes long, which is about half of an average William
Boquet, but there was an effort on costumes and lighting. It was also
the first time I used the name Marteau Films, as a mere joke: Marteau
is French for Hammer, and my favorite Frankenstein movies are the
Hammer productions with Peter Cushing.

2004-2007

One year later, I made a fifth William
Boquet, the only episode that would be shot outside of Paris and its
surroundings. L'Amour aux trousses (a pun spoofing the french
title for North by Northwest, where I replaced Death with
Love). We spent four days in Normandy, filming scenes on the beach
and in town, where the detective was being chased mostly by women who
wanted to rape him – and a few individuals who wanted to kill him
or mutilate him. We had a blast, but the film was another of these
no-budget, private-joke efforts that couldn't appeal to a lot of
people outside a small circle of friends.

After I spent almost two years on a
more ambitious film called Freudy(but again, without
professional means or a real crew), William Boquet returned for his weirdest adventure in 2006: Fax Bulle-d'O². Pierre was
playing the character for the third time, and I was directing, but
for the first time it wasn't from a script that I had written: it was
one of three episodes penned by Jean-Noël Georgel (the other two
were never filmed). It was a very strange story, where the world was
losing its colors around the FBI agent, who had made an enemy out of
his own subconscious double. It could have been exciting, but I
underestimated the complexity of making the final product
intelligible, and it ended up being quite a mess – my favorite
parts are the opening and closing credits! It was the second time
Matthieu was scoring one of my films (the first having been Freudy).

After that, another episode called
Repas Eternel (which had Boquet track down a cannibal) was
planned, with a friend directing and me playing the lead again –
eight years after Seven-Up. We started shooting a few scenes,
but the whole thing rapidly fell apart. Which is when I started
concentrating on writing something that could be made into a REAL
film. Not a 20-minute selfish surreal trip, but a feature film that a
normal movie-goer would be interested in! Sherlock Holmes vs
Frankenstein? Not yet, folks! I know, this is beginning to sound
like How I met your mother, but remember we're barely in 2008
at this point...

2008-2009

I called Jean-Noël and asked him if he
would write something really ambitious with me. He said yes, and we
got down to work. So here was the plan: to write a 100-page script
loosely based on a french comic book character, then send it to the author
and hope that he likes it. It was a very silly plan, for two reasons:
first, having the author approve your script would not be a guarantee
that it will make it to the screen; second, you could have the
problem we ended up having: when Jean-Noël and I contacted the author's agent,
we learned that the rights had already been optioned, and there was
no way our script would be read. They didn't even want to know the
pitch or anything, we just had to put our work in a drawer and move
on to the next project. It was the second feature-long script I'd
worked on, the first was called Old-Up and had gone through several versions from 2000 to
2003, and had ultimately been shelved (too expensive, too many
characters, too hard to keep the three writers focused on a same
project). Jean-Noël had already written and directed a no-budget
80-minute film a few years before. But this particular script could
have been our key to “real” filmmaking, if only we had chosen our
subject more wisely. There we were, having worked for almost a year
on a script (we had also made a short test-film which wasn't too bad –
but had very poor special effects!), and having no real plan for the
foreseeable future – apart from sticking to our day jobs.

The frustration that arose from this
situation drove me to my usual fix: William Boquet. I took the unused
footage for Repas Eternel and used it to spawn a seventh episode, Flou
(Blur). I played the detective once again, and put the
character in an uncomfortable situation: he wakes up one day almost
blind, his entire environment reduced to a blur. He starts picturing
everyone with his own face, and wonders how he's gonna solve the case
of missing person he's dealing with. Matthieu Huvelin scored this one
as well, and Jean-Noël plays a new FBI agent (one who had been
introduced in the previous installment), but the film is unlike any
of the previous entries. William Boquet has always been my double in
a way, and each film had mirrored something of my life at the point
it was made: Teddy was about leaving childhood, WB4 was
filled with the feeling of liberty I had when exiting business
school... but it was never deliberate. This seventh episode ended up
being too personal, and while it reflects one of the dearest periods
in my life (basically, how I realized that I had met my soulmate), it
doesn't make for a very good movie – except for my wife and I!

Flou was filmed in 2009,
completed in 2010, and remains to this day William Boquet's last
episode. I don't see the character returning any time soon, but if he
does, he won't be sporting a deerstalker hat. Days of dealing with a
Sherlock Holmes wannabe are long gone now.

Tuesday, 15 July 2014

In 1997, I was floating through high
school with no real assiduity, except in theater class. I was 15 and
in the equivalent of Junior Year. The year before, I had made a short
film with a classmate named Jean-Noël Georgel. We first intended it
to be a “Tale from the Crypt”, but then it became an odd story of
nightmares and surreal humor, shot with a camcorder and left
unfinished after one of the actresses went missing (this was before
cell phones and e-mails, it was hard to find someone when he wasn't in
the phone book).

Jean-Noël had then moved to Lyons with
his family, so I found a new bunch of people to make movies with. One of them
started writing a script about a private detective and the murder of
a teddy bear. It wasn't going anywhere, so he dropped it. I asked
Emmanuel if I could take the premice and write my own script from it,
and he had no problem with that – he even went on to play the
detective. It was the start of a saga that would last 13 years.

I had to come up with a name and
personality for the hero: my love for puns drove me to chose William
Boquet ('bilboquet' is the french word for cup-and-ball game), and he
took elements from various iconic sleuths: he was an untidy bachelor,
acted cynical, wore a trenchcoat and yes, a deerstalker hat. Which
pretty much established him as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes wannabe.
The movie was logically titled Teddy, and had William Boquet
inteviewing the inhabitants of the building where the teddy bear was
murdered. Again, it was a surreal murder comedy, probably influenced
by the TV series The Avengers (John Steed and his women, not
Iron Man and his pals). We shot it in three afternoons with two
camcorders, and it looks pretty awful. There was only one copy of the
script, which was hand-written on a notebook, and we managed to
misplace it halfway through the shoot. I had to tell the actors what
their lines were before each scene (the script was recovered a few
days later under my bed, and I realized then that I had forgotten a
few lines and jokes in the process). Beside William Boquet, the film
introduced a character called Fax Bulle-d'Air, a paranoid FBI agent
inspired by Fox Mulder; I realized a few years later, when I
discovered

16-year-old me as William Boquet

the series Get Smart, that Fax Bulle-d'Air was
actually very similar to Maxwell Smart!

1998

A year later, a friend of mine called
Bastien encouraged me to write a sequel. He knew I had a few ideas
for a 'William Boquet universe', with a gallery of supporting
characters that had yet to be developed. I wrote this sequel under
the title Viande Froide (Cold Meat), and introduced
police commissioner Lacroûte, who behaved a bit like the
commissioner Gordon from the 60s Batman series: each time a case was
brought to his attention, he instantly called William Boquet to solve
it for him. The guy only spent his day reading books and drinking
beers. FBI agent Fax Bulle-d'Air was also returning, and was revealed
to have a caring wife, who hired Boquet to protect her husband.
Viande Froide was directed by Bastien, who had me play William
Boquet in place of Emmanuel, who wasn't interested in returning.
Again, three days of shooting, horrible camcorder image and cheesy
lines delivered by teenage amateur actors. Hey, what did you expect?

1999

Another year later, I was finally
finishing high school, and decided to shoot a final William Boquet
episode (or so I thought) called Seven-up. I was playing the
detective again, and directing myself (which I found very
uncomfortable, even on such a light, no-budget production). The story
was a spoof of David Fincher's Seven, with a mysterious killer making up his
own list of deadly sins: Ugliness, Bad Taste, etc. In the last
scene, we understood he had been killing people who had annoyed
William Boquet at some point, and then he shot

himself for being
the embodiment of the seventh “sin”: intolerance. Seven-up
was shot in July 1999, and probably required 9 or 10 days of filming.
It was a bit better than the two previous ones, I think, and was a
lot more graphic: there were several violent murder scenes, one rape,
and Boquet ended with the blood of the murderer all over his face and
clothes.

During high school, I also spent some
time writing and drawing a comic book called Schtounks. It was
about a war between two people called the Schtounks and the Schtonks
(confusing, I know). One of the characters was a detective called
Scherloc Tounk, inspired by... you know who. There was also a
scientist called Professor Von Chlok, who used body parts to create a
monster called Alioun. For his lab, I drew inspiration from the
promotional stills for Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein.

Tuesday, 8 July 2014

Sherlock Holmes. Frankenstein. Sherlock Holmes VERSUS Frankenstein. The film project has been floating around for some time now, and there have been questions lately about whether it's still alive. The answer is: it's been around for much longer than one might think, and yes, it's ALIVE... ALIIIIVE. But assembling a budget for a film is very comparable to piecing together a body from the right elements: you need to dig up coffins at night, with the risks that go with it. Risk of not having the strength or the tools to dig. Risk of being stopped in your endeavour. Risk of not finding the right body parts in the coffin you spent hours unearthing. Risk of having one part rot while you unearth the next. Finally, risk of not succeeding in breathing life in the body you manage to assemble in your secret lab.
But before you even start digging, you need a plan. And even before that, you need to be seized by the urge to devise this plan. Let me tell you the whole story, the path that led from watching films as a kid to trying to make them as an adult. It's a long and bumpy road, and it's still under construction.

1986-1989

It all begun in kindergarten. I had been watching Miyazake's cartoon Sherlock Hound on TV for some time, and I enjoyed it more than most other cartoons of that time (except Thundercats!), but nothing had prepared me for The Great Mouse Detective. I saw it in a theater when it first came out, which might have been for my 5th birthday – since the film was released in France in late November 1986, and my birthday is in early December. The setting (Victorian England!), the exciting music and the unforgettable characters (the evil Ratigan had an amazing song that ended with one of his henchmen being fed to a huge cat) stuck with me, to the point where I wanted to set up a show at school, where we would have recreated the streets of London in the hall, and disguised the children as mice and rats. It didn't go farther than a few talks with my parents because, let's face it, I didn't have the chops to stage a theater play at the age of 5.Fast forward: this time I know it was a birthday, my 8th. I must have been a Sherlock Holmes geek by then, because my presents were a deerstalker hat and a VHS tape of The Sign of Four (the one with Ian Richardson). I was able to compare it to Granada's version of the story, which I had already watched countless times. I loved the Holmes series with Jeremy Brett,

8-year-old me

even though I found it extremely scary and disturbing at time (I remember The Greek Interpreter as being a source of nightmares). I probably didn't understand everything, but the character of Sherlock Holmes as played by Brett was one I could relate to – distant and centered on his own vision, yet keen on doing the right thing and on helping his fellow men, even when it meant ignoring the law. He also went into disguise on numerous occasions, which was one of my favourite hobbies at that time.
Less than three weeks after that birthday, Christmas came along. I must have had a number of presents, but there's only one I can remember to this day: a pocket edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein(a French translation of course, and one that might have been simplified a bit). The story was compelling, and much more complex than I thought it would be: the name Frankenstein was known to me from its presence in everyday's culture, as a generic speechless monster with a flat head, and I was surprised to learn that Frankenstein was actually the creator's name – and the creature was more of a man than a monster. The questions of identity and loneliness resonated in me at that time, and I remember being partial to the Creature, who had a revenge to take on a world who didn't understand him. Victor Frankenstein, in my eyes, was an irresponsible asshole who should have thought twice before giving life to a being he wasn't ready to care for. Growing up, I became more interested in Victor's character, who goes through a tough journey: driven by passion, he makes a mistake as a young man, practically a teenager, and then realizes that he will never be free from his mistake. Not until he dies. There are so many ways to interpret Frankenstein, as a story of fatherhood, creation, life, love and death, that you could read it every year and see a new side to it each time.

1991-1994

It was not until I was 10 that I saw my first Frankenstein film. It was of course the 1931 classic with Boris Karloff, and I finally met the flat-headed monster that I had been aware of before even reading the novel. I enjoyed the movie for what it was – a dry, expressionist version of the story that focused on a few aspects while discarding a lot of the book's elements for entertainment's sake. At that time, I felt it was oversimplifying the monster's story by making him speechless. Then a week later, I saw Bride of Frankenstein and although I loved that they introduced the blind violin player, I revised my idea that the Monster had to speak – Karloff chatting with Ernest Thesiger in a vault was too comedic for my serious 10-year-old self. Now I enjoy all of Universal's Frankenstein movies, and I get the humor and greatness in Bride – but the first entry still holds a special place in my heart.
In November 1994, my father took me to a theater play called La Nuit du Crime, where the audience had to sort out who the murderer was. It was sponsored by the newly created 'Société Sherlock Holmes de France', and my solving the case earned me a diploma that made me a “honorary member”. Maybe this is when it all started!..